Destiny 2 studio Bungie announced 220 employees were being laid off on July 31, 2024, the decision leaving the player base fuming and many calling for CEO Pete Parsons to step down.
Bungie reported that roughly 17% of its studio was being laid off. 220 staff were revealed to have lost their jobs in an announcement titled “The New Path For Bungie”. The studio cited the typical “rising costs of development” alongside “industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions” as its reasoning behind the layoffs.
Pete Parsons, CEO of Bungie has promised the studio will continue to make great games, stating that over 850 team members are still working on both Marathon and Destiny 2.
However, that hasn’t stopped much of the gaming community from massively criticizing the announcement, with many pointing at Parsons to step down from their role as CEO of the company.
Step down, Pete. https://t.co/I5d7L8kcfq
— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) July 31, 2024
“Pete is a joke,” former Bungie employee Griffith Bennett stated.
Parsons faced even further backlash when players discovered that the CEO had spent over $2.3 million USD on classic cars after Bungie was purchased by Sony in 2022. An account on the car trading website Bring A Trailer by the name of bngparsons has spent millions of dollars in the past couple of years.
Bungie lays off 17% of it's workforce… unrelated here is a list of cars the CEO has purchased on BATPlayers and workers need to support each other.https://t.co/48qToI4Cf7
— TAILORED (@boxrTailored) July 31, 2024
“Well done Pete. So what’s the next car you’re getting?” one Twitter user said.
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“Supporting your CEO’s spending habits so they can buy rare automobiles every 60 days before being laid off is very 2024 energy tbh,” another joked.
Bungie employees have stepped forward en masse to state that their teams and themselves have been laid off, with global community lead dmg04 regarding the announcement as “inexcusable”.
Inexcusable. Industry leading talent being lost, yet again. Accountability falling upon the workers who have pushed the needle to deliver for our community time and time again.Please maintain focus on those who’ve lost their position & income. Offer help where you can. https://t.co/SSDveUd5uW
— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) July 31, 2024
According to a player support analyst, their entire team was laid off, with another former employee stating that the team worked harder than anyone else, “through weekends – holidays – and the pay was atrocious, only to [get] tossed out.”
The layoff announcements come only two months after the massive success of The Final Shape, which we called “one of the best expansions ever made.”
Hype around the expansion also led to an enormous spike in player count, nearly clearing Destiny 2’s all-time peak.
This news follows the announcement of an earlier round of layoffs at Bungie back in October, 2023.